Yesterday was National When Pigs Fly Day.
It’s a day to take joy in silliness, but more importantly, it’s a celebration of possibilities. I love this description from one of the many online day calendars: “It reminds us that anything is possible if we are brave enough to take risks and pursue our dreams, no matter how farfetched they may seem. “
For decades, I nurtured a dream of writing novels. I can’t tell you how many times I jotted hand-written notes and partial chapters in workbooks, and magical ideas on scraps of paper as they came to me. I had a drawer full of them. (Now I put them in my phone.)
But I didn’t study writing in university, or become a journalist. I did, however, have passion to fuel me. For all that time, I read good writing and bad, and studied a lot about crafting novels. Still, it seemed a dream out of reach. I had full-on ‘imposter syndrome’, even though I’d been writing business articles and marketing copy for a local college I worked at, and a fledgling blog.
I got better with practice. This is a really important point. No one magically becomes an expert on the first try, or the second, or even the tenth. Becoming good takes time, and dedication.
In 2020 I retired from my full-time job just as the pandemic lock-downs began. That was a tough time for all of us, but my hubby was still going to work as an ‘essential worker’, whereas I was stuck at home for the most part. Weekly grocery excursions, all masked-up and hand-sanitizer equipped, and walks around a botanical garden, in the fresh air and mask-free, kept my sanity intact.
By the autumn, I was really at loose ends, but National Novel Writing Month was approaching, and I thought that year I’d really give it a crack. After all, what did I have to lose?
That event is all about getting words and a plot out your head and onto ‘paper’, because no matter how much you may wish to write a book, nothing can happen until you stop dreaming and start writing. The task for the month of November is to do your best to write 50,000 words. They don’t have to be great words – that comes later in the editing process.
One of the negative ideas that had been holding me back was: What if I spend a year writing a book and it’s crap? I’ll have wasted all that time. Well, I figured that spending a month on it wasn’t too much to invest. At least I’d have given it a shot, after decades of fiddling around. I had a basic plot for a trilogy, and I knew where each book would begin and end.
The other negative idea was: What if I suck at writing? I truly had no idea if I could fill out a complete book, or if I could write good dialogue, or convey my ideas adequately. The answer to that was: Just try writing the damn thing!
If, at the end of a month, I had a pile of garbage, at least I’d finally done it. But, if I wrote 50,000 words that were decent, then I’d have the makings of my first novel.
That November was lots of work – there’s no softening the fact that you have to produce around 3,000 words a day – but exhilarating. As I wrote about my protagonist, Romy Ussher, and the strange world she found herself drawn into, the plot just spooled itself out like a movie in my imagination. My characters began to live in my head, and to speak their minds. Sometimes they surprised me, which was a delight.
By the end of the month, I’d produced 50, 520 words. OMG, I’d done it. The words were good, I thought. So I kept going, caught up in Romy’s journey. Frankly, I was having a blast.
I worked hard at my novel, in spurts. Sometimes I was stuck on a plot point, but if I let it percolate in my head for a couple of days, invariably the answer came to me. To a large extent, I let the characters do what they wanted to do and just wrote it down.
On July 31, 2021, I finally typed “The End”. It was a little surreal. I’d actually written my first novel. My hubby and I cracked open a bottle of champagne. Then, as instructed by NaNoWriMo, I stepped away from the draft for a month.
Editing began with returning to the book with fresh eyes. I love writing on a computer because it’s easy to move things around as needed and make corrections. I didn’t really remove anything, but I did beef up the cliffhanger ending, making it more robust and emotion-filled. Then, when I’d edited as much as I could, when I was starting to lose perspective, it was time to hand it over to some beta readers to see what they made of it.
You see, I thought it was a good story, but I had no idea if anyone else would. I gave my generous recruits a list of points I wanted them to look for – things like if the story bogged down in places, if there were continuity errors, if they even just enjoyed the ride.
My hubby was my first beta reader, and even though urban fantasy isn’t his normal reading genre, he loved it. He was candid about a couple of things that didn’t work, and I knew that he wouldn’t have said he liked it if he actually didn’t.
My beta readers loved it, with some great feedback about things that needed tweaking. Too much description about the locations in the book was a big one. Fair enough – I’d written things out so that I could picture them thoroughly and consistently, but I didn’t need to include all of that in the book. My rewrites made the book better, tighter, smoother.
The following November (2021), I started working on Book 2 during NaNoWriMo. I wrote with a lot more confidence, with Book 1 healthy and waiting to be published. Again I went through the First Draft – Percolate – Edit – Beta Readers process.
My novels clock in around 600 pages each – they’re not heavy reading, but they’re rich with the supernatural, history and mythology. I can’t rush through them – I respect them, and my readers, too much.
In May of 2023, after looking deeply into the publishing business and how I wanted to go about things, and proofreading, creating the cover blurb, and designing the covers of all 3 novels so that I had a consistent look and feel, I published and held the Launch Party for the first book, Through the Monster-glass. People bought it, and loved it! (I used to edit publications for a local university, and worked as a graphic designer for ten years – doing all things yourself may not be in your skill set, so don’t be afraid to recruit outside help to bring your project to fruition.)
This past July I published the second book, Into the Forbidden Fire. Now I’m working on finishing the first draft of the third and final book (title reveal coming in a few months 😊). Fans are already asking me to write more books in my same imagined ‘universe’; they don’t want to leave it behind. One person told me that I’d restored their love of reading. How great a compliment is that!
But it all began with those first tentative words I wrote during National Novel Writing Month. I don’t know if I’ll ever become a best seller, but as much as I’d love to (of course I would, as every writer wants to), it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that I followed my dream and accomplished something I never really thought I could. Pigs can indeed fly!
Run with your dream, whatever it may be, and don’t let others discourage you because they’re not willing to do the same. It will take work, as all great things do, but the journey itself will be so worth it.
#NationalWhenPigsFlyDay
